Are you up for a digital dare?

Yesterday I launched a little YouTube experiment challenging people to do a digital dare. If you’ve not done it yet, have a play with it here:

It’s all thanks to my daughter. She took a bit of a craze for making those origami foldy things she calls a ‘chatterbox’. And while doing some YouTube research for a talk, I realised I could build one. So I did. And it was a hell of a lot more work than I thought.

First there was the recording of the videos. Twenty nine of the blighters. And – of course – I had to do several takes of some of them.

Then there was the uploading of the videos. They are HD quality so that took an age.

Then there was the discovery that YouTube couldn’t cope with the way the videos were encoded.

Then there was the experimentation (and advice from Quintin at Army of Id), the downloading of new software, the re-encoding of all the films and the arduous re-uploading.

Then there was the adding of the interactive elements and the linking the films together.

And then the testing of all the options.

And then realising that one of the dares doesn’t really work.

And finally launching it regardless.

I’ve now been asked a few times why I did it.

And the answer’s pretty simple: to learn stuff.

Which I have.

I’ll share some of it with you over the next couple of days.

In the meantime, thanks a million to all of you who’ve passed it on and given me such great feedback.

There’s another experiment on the way. And this one looks as if it’s going to be just as much of a pain in the arse.